Simply Heaven (10 page)

I’m only three hours into the country, but I have already discovered that the celebrated British reserve is largely mythical. Between Gatwick and Kingham, I’ve had full and frank exchanges on the subject of non-working ticket machines, the advantages of the Post Office queuing system, the way the ashtrays have filled up with chewing gum since they banned smoking, someone called Jordan, the blandness of mozzarella and – four times – how disappointing the weather is. I kind of like it. They may have no taste in outerwear, but this is obviously related to the fact that most of these people are madder than a box of frogs.

‘The thing is, right,’ continues my new friend, ‘that they continue to claim that they’re running at a loss. I mean, four hundred people to a carriage and they still pretend they can’t make a profit.’

‘That,’ a tall, businessy-looking woman in a charcoal wool suit and four-inch stilettos, glamorously topped off with a bright orange cagoule, joins in, unannounced, from beside Rufus’s shoulder, ‘is because no one ever buys tickets.’

‘No point.’ A man with a mobile phone clicks his mouthpiece closed. ‘When the chances of seeing a conductor are something like ten to one.’

‘Yes,’ says anorak man, ‘that’s right.’

‘Took me eight hours to get home from Birmingham last week,’ says mobile.

‘Tchuch,’ says businesswoman, ‘typical.’

And then they all do something else British, which is that, having concluded this enthusiastic exchange, they clam up like clams and behave as though they’ve just discovered that not only are they in a room full of hardened criminals,
they haven’t even been introduced
.

Rufus folds his paper over and lifts it up once more so that I can see the headlines on the inside page. Well, headline. Page 15 seems to be entirely consumed with what looks like a gruesome murder case. ‘Man cooked fiancée’s liver with onions and mash, court hears’, screams the banner over a huge block of text peppered with emboldened sub-heads reading ‘Labour voter’, ‘Tony Blair’ and ‘Hunt saboteur’. Above an advertisement for some kind of chairlift that lets you carry your walking cane upstairs, another legend reads: ‘Further detail, p. 25, 29’.

I finished my novel on the train to Reading – quite appropriate, I thought – and staring out of the window has, so far, not been the most rewarding of experiences. Of course, I know that neighbourhoods next to a railway are rarely associated with affluence in any country, but this introduction to the English landscape is depressing. Everything here seems somehow a bit, well, small, cramped, constricted. And
grey
. Hints of lives lived at half-cock, swept into hiding from the outside world behind net curtains and stone-clad, double-glazed porches, tragically optimistic barbecue-patio combos.

Between bodies, over heads, I peer up at the digital noticeboard above the door. Of the stations we’ve already passed, there was Didcot, a place that looks from the station as though it doesn’t exist apart from the huge, waisted concrete towers of a power station and a railway museum where knots of people mill about, knee-deep in bindweed, hands in anorak pockets, and Oxford, City of Dreaming Spires: a city that’s always held out a promise of medieval splendour, but didn’t seem to consist of a lot more than the usual light engineering firms and red-brick terraces, with a railwayside graveyard for good measure.

And after that, the station list has degenerated into strings of syllables that sound to my ears – accustomed as they are to bastardisations of Aboriginal descriptions, or convict jokes – like they’ve been put together by an advertising focus group intent on conveying quintessential Englishness. Fantasies of what these places are like flash through my head as the names crawl across the screen. Hanborough: got to have a horse fair. Charlbury: geese. Kingham: must be near a palace. Moreton-in-Marsh: blokes with long sticks. Evesham: good for sinful chickies. Pershore: big white cotton handkerchiefs. Worcester Shrub Hill: wattles. Worcester Foregate Street: cobbles, and those diamond-patterned windows that look like they’re made of liquorice. Malvern Link: steam trains; Jenny Agutter shouting, ‘Daddy, my daddy.’ Great Malvern: big hats, limp wrists. Colwall: sticks of pink and white confectioners’ rock. Ledbury: small kids down coalmines. Hereford: enormous swinging testicles. Yeah, I know. Don’t go there. So far, Hanborough has been little more than a platform by a big field, Charlbury a cute little station covered in flowers with something that looks like an old quarry next to it, and Kingham a set of sleepers in a birch wood. Good sky, though: big, grey, sort of Constable-ish. We’ll be getting off at Moreton-in-Marsh.

Rufus folds up the
Telegraph
and jerks his chin doorwards. ‘Right. Better get moving. Can’t be more than five minutes.’

He leads the way, and I note how trail negotiations are conducted on my new turf: the stream of unfinished sentences – ‘Can I just …?’, ‘Excuse …’, ‘Sorry …’, ‘Do you mind if I …?’ – as if a completed request would somehow be an insult. The corridor is packed to bursting, yet they all look like they’re taking an exam or something: the odd rolling eye stands out for a second or two, but most faces remain impassive, calm, even. They must all be cultivating enormous ulcers.

The train slows, stops, and everyone wobbles like bottles on a conveyor belt. And then nothing happens. There’s an elderly couple standing by the door, and they’re looking out of the window, going ‘Moreton-in-Marsh? No, that’s not us. Where’s Pershore, dear? Two stops up? Well, then …’

Some shifting. A couple of people clear their throats. Eventually, someone three layers ahead of me says, politely, ‘Excuse me.’

The old lady looks up. ‘We’re not getting off here,’ she explains.

‘Yes, but could you open the door, please?’

‘We’re not getting off here,’ she repeats, very slowly, this time, as though her interlocutor must be foreign.

The engine revs. We’re going to get carried all the way to Hereford.

Suddenly, a huge, booming voice bellows: ‘Yes, dunderhead, BUT WE ARE!!!’

‘Well, I never …’ begins the old man.

‘OPEN THE DOOR, YOU MORON!’ booms the voice.

‘I will
not
,’ begins the old man, drawing himself up as far as he can go in the limited space, ‘have you speak to my wife like—’

And suddenly, thirty voices shout as one: ‘OPEN THE DOOR!’

Finally, he gets it, presses the button. ‘There’s no need to be
rude
,’ he says.

‘Can you get out and let other people off, please?’

‘I already said, we’re not getting off here,’ he explains.

‘YES! BUT WE ARE!’

‘Well, really, I—’

The single voice again. ‘GET OUT OF THE WAY, OR I’LL TAKE THAT FLAT CAP OFF YOUR HEAD AND SHOVE IT SO FAR UP YOUR ARSE YOU’LL NEVER FIND IT AGAIN! MOVE OR I’LL CLUB YOU TO DEATH WITH A BABY SEAL! HIT IT, OR YOU’LL NEVER SEE YOUR BOWLS CLUB AGAIN!’

This finally unpops them. Three dozen people pile out on to the platform, panting and cussing. The owner of the big voice turns out to be a man so large he could carry a combine single-handed, purple of face and clad in, of all things, Prince of Wales check plus fours. You have got to be kidding. His rage over, he stands pleasantly by the old couple, helping them back on to the train and handing them their luggage. But the volume is little diminished. ‘BLOODY AWFUL, THESE TRAINS,’ he yells. ‘CAN’T BLAME YOU FOR GETTING A BIT CONFUSED.’

The doors slide to, and the train moves off. I look around. Another halt as desolate as the previous three: desultory planting, cracked, gravelly tarmac. Not as desolate, mind, as the sort of one-shack-and-a-blowfly hellholes you get in the Aussie desert, but not exactly the glamour centre of the universe. And while I’m picking up my bag again (Rufus seems to have forgotten the theory that gents carry things for ladies. I’ll find out later that this is fairly much par for the course), I hear my husband’s voice, itself several dozen decibels louder than when he last opened his mouth, hail the blustering man in the plus fours.

‘Roly!’ he shouts. ‘I might have guessed that it was you making all that racket!’

The man-mountain swings round like a piñata, and a passing traveller flies off down the platform as he catches him a blinding blow with the duffel bag on his shoulder. Oblivious, he strides towards Rufus (well, takes two enormous steps, which is all he needs to get from one side of the platform to the other), one meaty hand extended in greeting.

Rufus’s hand disappears within Roly’s clasp, and, as he opens his mouth to speak, he is reduced, instead, to coughing like a consumptive as the man’s other hand descends on to his shoulder in three hearty claps of the sort that would have removed Rufus’s dentures if this had been taking place in a comic book.

‘Well, bugger me sideways, Wattestone!’ he shouts. ‘Was just thinking about you! On m’way to your casa, as it happens.’

Rufus, recovering, says: ‘Really? Excellent. You can give us a lift, then.’

I’ve chosen to stand over by the exit gate, mostly because I don’t want to be knocked, accidentally, on to the tracks. People scuttle past, ducking as Roly’s elbows fly.

‘Aha!’ he bellows. ‘So there
is
a ‘we’! Heard about this clandestine marriage nonsense. Which one is she, then?’

He glares about him, and I get my first full sight of his face. He looks how I have always imagined the Minotaur probably looked: if you spliced bull genes into the human body, this would be the result. I wouldn’t have been surprised, to be honest, if he had a pair of neat little horns and a curtain ring through his nose. This Roly has all the charm of a Charolais: pinky-red, wrinkled skin, devoid of any sign of a suntan; flattened, flared nostrils, eyes too small for the head, six kilos of pure muscle in place of a neck and a tuft of Tintin hair sticking upwards from a forehead that is just made for butting. The guy’s no beauty.

I stick a finger in the air and say: ‘I think that’d be me.’

‘Hah!’ he cries. ‘Wife. Wattestone Mrs, Junior! Congratulations!’

I’d half-hoped that my female status might let me out of the more enthusiastic greeting rituals, but instead I drop my bag as a meaty paw bangs down upon my back with excruciating heartiness. The contents – passport, makeup, a couple of tampons, notebook, pens, Ibuprofen, contraceptive pills, handful of Maltese coinage – scatter across the ground and I’m temporarily too winded to do anything about it. Rufus starts chasing them as I gasp for breath.

‘Remember your own strength, Cruikshank,’ he says. What is it with Englishmen and surnames? ‘Melody gave up rugger years ago.’

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ says Roly. ‘Roly Cruikshank. Old school friend. Pony Club too, till m’last horse collapsed underneath me at Badminton. Pity. Fine old chap. Wouldn’t let me shoot him m’self. Went for carpaccio on th’continent, no doubt.’

‘How ya goin’, Roly?’

‘So you really
are
Australian. Good news. Cats. Pigeons. Say g’day ever, do you?’

‘G’day,’ I say co-operatively, and am rewarded with an ear-splitting explosion of mirth. ‘Good for you! Good for you! Welcome to the Cotswolds!’

‘Bonzer,’ I say. ‘Good on yer, mate.’

He’s easily amused. Subjects me to a bit more assault and battery, then picks up my rucksack and leads us towards the car park.

Rufus catches me up, pushes my handbag into my arms. ‘Roly Cruikshank,’ he says. ‘Mostly harmless.’

‘Mostly?’

‘Mostly,’ he says, out of the side of his mouth. ‘He has what they call a vibrant imagination. Read a lot of Alastair MacLean as a child and never really got over it. Sees himself as a sort of Wooster-at-arms.’

‘OK. So that was how come he was playing badminton on a horse, yeah?’

Rufus laughs. ‘No. It’s a horse trials. Attached to a house. That they named the game after.’

‘Ah. Good-oh. We live and learn.’

Roly Cruikshank waits beside a canvas-topped Land Rover that has recently been up to its axles in mud. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Car’s in the shop. I’ll sling yer bag in the back.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Heigh-ho. Anything for a pretty lady. Better jump in the front with me. Bit of blood in the back. No place for a newlywed. You don’t mind, do you, R?’

Rufus peers gingerly beneath the canvas and clear plastic flap that constitutes a back door to the vehicle. ‘No, no. It’s fine. You don’t mind if I shift the front ones to the back, do you?’

‘Be m’guest.’

Curious as to the source of this exchange, I crane over my shoulder the second I’m settled with my handbag between my feet. It’s full-on charnel-house back there. Rufus squats on a built-in bench running along the side of the truck, against a background of dead birds. Pheasants. White-kid faces on lolling heads, clouded eyes, leathery talons crooked in rigor mortis, they hang by tied-together necks from meat hooks suspended from the rollbars. Twenty of them, sleek and russet and green, tail feathers sweeping the head of a friendly looking black-and-white spaniel, which thumps its tail when it registers that my eyes are on it. Rufus gives it a scratch behind the ear, trails a cuff through a puddle of congealed blood that lies on the lid of a toolbox. ‘Hello, Perkins, old bean,’ he says. ‘How’re you doing?’

He notices the blood, pulls a face. ‘Damn,’ he says. ‘That’ll make the old girl happy. Where’d you shoot this lot, Roly?’

Roly, turning the ignition key, says: ‘Hampshire. Last week. Kept Perkins busy, anyway. Be just about ready to eat by now, s’pose. Fancy a couple?’

Rufus shakes his head. ‘I’m sure there are a million lurking in the freezer at Bourton. Whose?’

‘Weatheralls’.’

‘Ah. Well?’

‘Fine. Arthriticky. Two hundred brace. Only six of us.’

‘Mmm. Bulldozer?’

‘’Fraid so. Took as many as a’cd.’

‘City fellahs?’

‘Austrians.’

‘Ah,’ says Rufus again. ‘W’dn’t mind a b’da’that ourselves.’

‘Agency. Hols people. Int’n’t. Waddya give th’man who h’zev’r’th’ng? Find th’URL for you f’y’like.’

‘Good one. Ta.’

I decide that it’s time to intervene. I could cope with not understanding what they’re talking about. I can even live with a deficit of pronouns. But if they’re going to dispense with vowels as well, I’ll be floundering without a lifebelt.